If you found last week’s community discussion on whether (good) bots could help save dying MMORPGs fascinating, then the video hereunder will suit you too. Last year we wrote about gamer and professional artist Andrea Fryer – you probably know her best as KatsPurr in the Massively OP community. She’s been working on a spectacular “Ultima Nostalgia” project to meld the worlds of Ultima Online and Wurm Online by recreating the former as a 3-D map inside the latter.
The project and server have come a long way since then, as her 10th episode shows; this particular one covers the creation of the isle of Nujel’m (one of my favorites as my guild used to use “Nuji bank” as our headquarters for a time). And during the episode, she discusses how empty some of these old sandboxes can feel.
“I’ve always felt that Wurm is a fantastic game, but one of its downfalls is that since players are capable of building as big cities as they like and keeping those all to themselves, this creates and issue of the game feeling empty,” KatsPurr wrote last week in the discussion about how to effectively use bots to make games feel alive (and stay alive). “Because then you go visit these grand huge cities and don’t see a single soul anywhere, especially if the owner happens to be offline! So I’ve always thought that Wurm should allow us to buy NPC deeds and plant them in various places (like a Smith NPC hammering away in a smithy shop, or a bartender standing behind the bar).”
Here’s the whole playlist if you’d like to start from the beginning!
